An amateur has discovered a trove of meteorites on Misfits Flat dry lake in Nevada. No meteorites had been found at this tiny lakebed before. In an unusual twist, at least some of those turn out to have fallen less than 300 years ago.

It made it. At 4:49 am Pacific Time, July 14, the New Horizons spacecraft slid by Pluto’s mottled orb and headed deeper into the voids of the solar system. The flyby’s closest approach lasted only three minutes.

The public is weighing in on the names that will annotate maps of a world no one has ever seen. As the New Horizons spacecraft closes in on Pluto and its moons, a campaign to solicit suggestions from the public, initiated by SETI Institute senior research scientist Mark Showalter, has provoked a torrent of imaginative labels for major features.

The SETI Institute is deeply involved with the New Horizons mission to Pluto, and several of our scientists are awaiting results that could truly revolutionize understanding of the solar system’s early history.

The New Horizons mission will help us understand worlds at the edge of our solar system by making the first reconnaissance of the dwarf planet Pluto and by venturing deeper into the distant, mysterious Kuiper Belt – a relic of solar system formation.

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Meet Our Scientists

Franck Marchis, Senior Research Scientist at the Carl Sagan Center at the SETI Institute, is involved in the definition of a new generation of AOs for 8 -10 m class telescopes and future Extremely Large Telescopes.